Re: [Usability]Re: Toolbar editor

["Adam D. Lopresto" <adam pubcrawler org>]

On Thu, 27 Mar 2003, Jeff Waugh wrote:

> <quote who="Calum Benson">
> 
> > > Sure, in the case of your needs and of this particular software, you're
> > > saying this feature is almost useless, that's fine.
> > 
> > Not just that, I'm also saying that in ten years of usability tests and
> > visiting customers, I've barely seen anyone customize their toolbar in any
> > application that supports it, beyond switching entire toolbars on or off.
> 
> Very, very worthwhile point.
> 
> > (Although admittedly that's because in some environments, users are just
> > not allowed to customise things, and/or because the application has
> > already been globally customised by the sysadmin to meet the needs of
> > those users).
> 
> Again, very worthwhile point.

In my experience, the reason no one customizes their toolbars is because people are
much more likely to mess with toolbars by adding things they use then by removing
things they don't use.  Since the MS Office toolbars come preloaded with everything
you could possibly want, there's no impetus to go in and remove things.  And no desire
to add more, because they're already full.

The desire to modify the toolbars becomes much more strong when, as has been advocated
here, the toolbars start nearly empty, and one finds oneself wishing to have feature X
that's used all the time on there.  

Of course, I don't think adding everything into the world by default is the right way
to deal with the problem of good toolbar design, but that is the reason that Office
toolbars don't get modified.  Doesn't mean they should be held up as a paragon of
intelligent design.
-- 
Adam Lopresto
http://cec.wustl.edu/~adam/

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